Continuing from previous post
Following are the web log entries that contain the new MSIE 8.0 user agent string, with the specific MS IP address blocked out:
—-.microsoft.com - - [04/Mar/2008:01:55:29 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 1406 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.0)"
—-.microsoft.com - - [04/Mar/2008:01:55:29 +0000] "GET /standards/ie8-standards-mode-by-default/ HTTP/1.1" 200 29177 "http://www.techmeme.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.0)"
Typically, IE access to this site results in only one log entry: the entry for the specific page. There are no log entries for CSS files, JS files, and so on, because IE doesn't support the XHTML MIME type, and therefore doesn't parse the page and pull these resources. This is what I'm seeing in my web log for these log entries.
These two log entries also reflect the new Office Live functionality, just released. The Office Live functionality could impact on what's picked up from a page–hard to say, because I don't have any Office Live accesses for my sites that aren't strict XHTML. However, if these log entries do reflect access of the post directly with IE8, based on the fact that none of the CSS or image files were also pulled, and based on the pattern of access of pages at this site by previous versions of IE, IE8 does not support the XHTML mime type.
To repeat what I said in the last post, this statement isn't based on a confirmation from the company. It's a guess based on current web log entries reflecting the new user agent string for IE8, an IP address that resolves to inside Microsoft, and matching a pattern I've seen with previous IE versions that cannot access this site because of the MIME type I use. With the continued silence from the IE team and Microsoft, guesswork is all I have to go on. I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong.
